Phone-y buying hype

FOR all the buzz around mobile commerce, many retailers are surprisingly lukewarm about its ability to get digital-savvy shoppers buying more from their websites.

A report by Forrester Research for trade group Shop.org shows Smartphones generated a small portion of online sales last year - about $5 billion of a $226 billion e-commerce market.

Retailers will continue to invest in mobile strategies, but the bulk of their technology spending in 2013 will be on the basics, such as improving online checkout, product descriptions and the overall user experience, according to the report.

The report is based on a survey of stores with e-commerce operations, as well as internet pure-plays.

"Retailers have been burned getting very, very hyped up over mobile,'' Forrester Research e-commerce analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said in a presentation at the National Retail Federation's annual convention this week in Manhattan.

"Even though consumers have these phones, the number of transactions is small.''

More than 27,000 people attended the federation's conference, which was highlighted by the presentation of the organisation's annual Gold Award to Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. At the conference, which ended yesterday, retailers discussed a number of topics, including mobile commerce.

Ms Mulpuru said one challenge of the sector is an ever-growing list of tablet devices, including Amazon's Kindle Fire and Microsoft's Surface.

She said that makes things "messier from a design and development perspective'', adding rhetorically, "what device do you develop for?''

The Forrester survey's retailers reported average online-sales growth last year of 28 per cent.

But Ms Mulpuru warned the explosive growth won't last forever, noting that the number of new online shoppers has begun to taper off.

She predicted that e-commerce would max out at 20 per cent of a retailer's sales - up from about 10 per cent currently.

She said "the party . . . has to end at some point''. Yesterday, the retail federation reported that US non-store sales during the festive season had increased 11.1 per cent from a year ago.

That figure was well above the 3 per cent gain for all holiday sales.

However, it was also down from last year's 15 per cent rise in e-commerce.

The Commerce Department reported that all retail sales reached $415.7 billion in December, 9, up 0.5 per cent.

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